In 2007, a researcher observed this whirlwind carrying gypsum crystals in the Chilean desert. Kathleen Benison

The Salar de Gorbea, some 13,000 feet above sea level, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, is like another planet. Active volcanoes dominate the muted, but colorful, vegetation-free landscape. In a few places, groundwater collects in salty, acidic pools. It evaporates in the sun, leaving behind gypsum crystals as big as your feet that protrude from the ground like daggers.

But they don’t stay put. Somehow they are scattered all over the place. And about three miles away it’s even weirder: It looks as if someone intentionally swept them into 15-foot-high piles, with some crystals merged together like giant gobs of rock candy.

The gypsum crystals can be as big as a person’s foot and protrude from the ground like daggers. Kathleen Benison

How they got there was a mystery, until someone stumbled upon a whirlwind so powerful, it defied textbooks. In a paper published in Geology in March, Kathleen Benison, a geologist at West Virginia University, documented how what she calls a gravel devil may be responsible for the large crystals’ movement around the desert.

“I remember holding one of the crystals and noticing how they were all broken,” Dr. Benison said. “I looked up, and there was one of these gravel devils.”

She watched for five minutes as a huge white cloud that appeared to materialize in a valley between two volcanoes moved across the landscape and over the pools before it vanished, right above the gypsum dunes. This happened every afternoon during her three-day visit in March 2007, but it is unclear how regularly they occur.

The gypsum forms into gravel dunes. Kathleen Benison

Like windblown sand grains, the crystal surfaces were scratched, suggesting that the wind had carried them. But typically anything bigger than a grain of sand can be moved only by gravity or surface water. Desert whirlwinds aren’t supposed to be strong enough to carry anything as large as these gravel-size gypsum crystals.

But whirlwinds occasionally defy thermodynamic speed limits, said Nicholas Heavens, a planetary scientist at Hampton University who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary about it. In Arizona, dust devils have been seen and proved capable of carrying small rodents, and in 2013, a ghostly wind ripped the side mirror off a police car in Hartford.

Dr. Heavens has no doubt that the gravel devil exists. It’s just extreme: To lift the crystals in the air and transport them, the speed at the center of a gravel devil must be around 150 miles per hour, he said. That’s at least the strength of an F0 tornado, and more like an F1.

After the gravel devils move the gypsum, some of it clumps together when exposed to groundwater. Kathleen Benison

He says he thinks the study of gravel devils may be a safe way to gain insights into how whirlwinds, including tornadoes, violate presumed speed limits on Earth. It may also reveal signs of extreme whirlwinds of the past if ancient gypsum deposits have a similar composition to these fresher ones in Chile.

But Dr. Benison, who found living algae and bacteria inside the crystals in Chile, is also interested in extreme life and how it can be preserved for thousands of years and transported via gypsum crystals. Recently in Mexico, scientists woke up microbes that were dormant for as long as 50,000 years in giant gypsum crystals.

And given the similarities in the climates in Salar de Gorbea and on Mars, Dr. Benison wonders if the crystals and dust devils here could serve as analogues for those that exist on Mars: “Can we look in those crystals and see the same kind of micro-organisms that we have in Chile?”

Measurement in ordinary hydrogen agrees with a surprising 2010 result on the element's exotic cousin — but gives a smaller value than virtually every other experiment.

05 October 2017

Axel Beyer

Researchers shone lasers at hydrogen atoms in a vacuum chamber to pinpoint the size of the protons inside.

The proton might truly be smaller than was thought. Experiments on an exotic form of hydrogen first found1 a puzzling discrepancy with the accepted size in 2010. Now, evidence from a German and Russian team points to a smaller value for the size of the proton with ordinary hydrogen, too.

The results, which appeared on 5 October in Science2, could be the first step towards resolving a puzzle that has made physicists doubt their most precise measurements, and even their most cherished theories.

Still, “before any resolution, this new value has to be confirmed”, says Jan Bernauer, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. If other labs confirm it, he adds, “then we can find why the old experiments were wrong, hopefully”.

Method mix-up

For decades, physicists have estimated the size of the proton using one of two main techniques. Atomic physicists use spectroscopy to measure the energy levels of electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus — consisting of either the single proton in a hydrogen atom, or a bigger nucleus. The size of the nucleus affects those energies because electrons spend some time moving through the nucleus as they orbit it.

Meanwhile, nuclear physicists have used a similar technique to the one that enabled Ernest Rutherford to discover atomic nuclei in the first place. They hit the atoms with beams of fast-moving electrons and measure how the electrons bounce off.

As their precision improved, both methods roughly came to agree on a radius of about 0.8768 femtometres (millionths of a millionth of a millimetre).

But in 2010, a novel kind of experiment completed at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, disrupted the consensus. After a decade of unsuccessful attempts, a multinational collaboration led by Randolf Pohl, then at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, Germany, measured energy transitions not in ordinary hydrogen, but in lab-made ‘muonic’ hydrogen. These are atoms in which the electron has been replaced by a muon — a particle similar to an electron in most of its properties, but 200 times more massive. The heavier particle spends more time inside the nucleus, which means that the proton’s size has a much larger effect on the muon’s energies — which, in turn, should lead to a much more precise estimate of the proton’s radius.

Pohl’s team found the proton to be 4% smaller than the accepted value. Some researchers speculated that perhaps some previously unknown physics could make muons act differently than electrons. This would have required a revision of the standard model of particle physics, which predicts that muons and electrons should be identical in every way except for their masses — and might have pointed to the existence of yet-to-be-discovered elementary particles.

Exciting technique

In the latest paper2, Pohl, now at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and his collaborators tickled hydrogen atoms — containing ordinary electrons — with two different lasers. The first one sent the atoms’ electrons into an excited state, and the second one put them into a higher-energy excitation. The team then detected the photons that the atoms released as their electrons fell back into lower-energy excitation states.

The team combined its data with an earlier, high-precision measurement to calculate the Rydberg constant, which expresses the energy that it takes to rip the electron off the hydrogen atom. Standard theory then enabled the researchers to calculate the radius of the proton from this constant. The value they found was consistent with the muonic-hydrogen measurement, and 5% smaller than the 'official' proton radius.

To ensure that they eliminated any spurious experimental effects, the team spent three years analysing its data, says Lothar Maisenbacher, a co-author of the paper and an atomic physicist at the MPQ.

Bernauer, who works on the electron–proton scattering technique, is impressed. “It’s a great experiment,” he says. “I think they really advanced their field with this.”

The care that they took is “very impressive”, and makes their measurement more reliable than many others, says Krzysztof Pachucki, a theoretical physicist at the University of Warsaw who is on the task group of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA).

CODATA, the international agency that publishes the best-known values of the fundamental constants, is taking notice of the Mainz experiment. “We will take this result very seriously,” says Pachucki. The committee is due to revise the ‘official’ handbook of universal constants of nature next year. Because of this experiment, CODATA will "most probably” change its values for the proton radius and Rydberg constant, he says.

More evidence needed

But the German–Russian group is not quite ready to claim that the puzzle has been solved, Maisenbacher says. “We have not identified any conclusive reason why the other measurements should not be correct themselves,” he says. “We would like to see more experiments from other people.”

A number of teams around the world are doing just that. Bernauer is interested, for example, in the results of spectroscopy experiments being done at York University in Toronto, Canada. If their measurement is also small, “then I would start to believe that the old data has a problem”, Bernauer says. But that would still leave open the matter of the electron–proton scattering results.

In those experiments, researchers have conventionally used electrons that have a range of different energies. Estimating the size of the proton required extrapolating all the way to an ideal situation, in which electrons had zero energy.

Ashot Gasparian, a particle and nuclear physicist at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro and his team have recently conducted an experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. They injected cold hydrogen gas directly into their electron accelerator, rather than bombarding liquid hydrogen kept in a plastic box, as was previously done. This technique enabled them to remove some experimental uncertainties and also to use electrons with lower energies than before. In principle, this could reveal whether and where the previous extrapolations went wrong. They are now analysing their data and hope to have results next year. “The ball is in our court,” says Gasparian.

There are so many false assumptions that it becomes meaningless. People who have read this thread will know that it's more likely that all the elements around us today on Earth are of recent origin, made through transmutation. There is no mechanism for Gold, Silver, etc..., to come from somewhere else, and be in the combinations that they are found in ore.

Each metal is different chemically. They can only be together if they were created together in situ.

Elements are sorted by Marklund convention, which occurs in Birkeland currents,and which I believe are coursing through the earth even as we speak.

If any electrical processes are involved in the formation of the earth, or in the ongoing life of earth, so the elements can get sorted.Since we can provide more intense conditions than the planet does, and still do not get transmutation, maybe the creation of elements still takes a bigger furnace than a planet can provide.

Unless there is some yet secret alchemical means of transmuting elements

The means for the elements to get here is by the Solar wind.Ions and atoms are caught in the ionosphere and eventually come to settle on Earth's surface via rain.Paul

By Jim Baggott November 9, 2017You’re sitting here, reading this article. Maybe it’s a hard copy, or an e-book on a tablet computer or e-reader. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re reading it on, we can be reasonably sure it’s made of some kind of stuff: paper, card, plastic, perhaps containing tiny metal electronic things on printed circuit boards. Whatever it is, we call it matter or material substance. It has a characteristic property that we call solidity. It has mass.

But what is matter, exactly? Imagine a cube of ice, measuring a little over one inch (or 2.7 centimeters) in length. Imagine holding this cube of ice in the palm of your hand. It is cold, and a little slippery. It weighs hardly anything at all, yet we know it weighs something.

Baggott_BR-4

Let’s make our question a little more focused. What is this cube of ice made of? And, an important secondary question: What is responsible for its mass?

To understand what a cube of ice is made of, we need to draw on the learning acquired by the chemists. Building on a long tradition established by the alchemists, these scientists distinguished between different chemical elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Research on the relative weights of these elements and the combining volumes of gases led John Dalton and Louis Gay-Lussac to the conclusion that different chemical elements consist of atoms with different weights which combine according to a set of rules involving whole numbers of atoms.

The mystery of the combining volumes of hydrogen and oxygen gas to produce water was resolved when it was realized that hydrogen and oxygen are both diatomic gases, H2 and O2. Water is then a compound consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, H2O.

This partly answers our first question. Our cube of ice consists of molecules of H2O organized in a regular array. We can also make a start on our second question. Avogadro’s law states that a mole of chemical substance will contain about 6 × 1023 discrete “particles.” Now, we can interpret a mole of substance simply as its molecular weight scaled up to gram quantities. Hydrogen (in the form of H2) has a relative molecular weight of 2, implying that each hydrogen atom has a relative atomic weight of 1. Oxygen (O2) has a relative molecular weight of 32, implying that each oxygen atom has a relative atomic weight of 16. Water (H2O) therefore has a relative molecular weight of 2 × 1 + 16 = 18.

About 99 percent of the masses of the proton and neutron seem to be unaccounted for.

It so happens that our cube of ice weighs about 18 grams, which means that it represents a mole of water, more or less. According to Avogadro’s law it must therefore contain about 6 × 1023 molecules of H2O. This would appear to provide a definitive answer to our second question. The mass of the cube of ice derives from the mass of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms present in 6 × 1023 molecules of H2O.

But, of course, we can go further. We learned from J.J. Thompson, Ernest Rutherford, and Niels Bohr and many other physicists in the early 20th century that all atoms consist of a heavy, central nucleus surrounded by light, orbiting electrons. We subsequently learned that the central nucleus consists of protons and neutrons. The number of protons in the nucleus determines the chemical identity of the element: A hydrogen atom has one proton, an oxygen atom has eight (this is called the atomic number). But the total mass or weight of the nucleus is determined by the total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus.

Hydrogen still has only one (its nucleus consists of a single proton—no neutrons). The most common isotope of oxygen has—guess what?—16 (eight protons and eight neutrons). It’s obviously no coincidence that these proton and neutron counts are the same as the relative atomic weights I quoted above.

Sapolsky_TH-F1

If we ignore the light electrons, then we would be tempted to claim that the mass of the cube of ice resides in all the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of its hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Each molecule of H2O contributes 10 protons and eight neutrons, so if there are 6 × 1023 molecules in the cube and we ignore the small difference in mass between a proton and a neutron, we conclude that the cube contains in total about 18 times this figure, or 108 × 1023 protons and neutrons.

So far, so good. But we’re not quite done yet. We now know that protons and neutrons are not elementary particles. They consist of quarks. A proton contains two up quarks and a down quark, a neutron two down quarks and an up quark. And the color force binding the quarks together inside these larger particles is carried by massless gluons.

Okay, so surely we just keep going. If once again we approximate the masses of the up and down quarks as the same we just multiply by three and turn 108 × 1023 protons and neutrons into 324 × 1023 up and down quarks. We conclude that this is where all the mass resides. Yes?

The naked quark is acutely embarrassed, and it quickly dresses itself with a covering of gluons.

No. This is where our naïve atomic preconceptions unravel. We can look up the masses of the up and down quarks on the Particle Data Group website. The up and down quarks are so light that their masses can’t be measured precisely and only ranges are quoted. The following are all reported in units of MeV/c2. In these units the mass of the up quark is given as 2.3 with a range from 1.8 to 3.0. The down quark is a little heavier, 4.8, with a range from 4.5 to 5.3. Compare these with the mass of the electron, about 0.51 measured in the same units.

Now comes the shock. In the same units of MeV/c2 the proton mass is 938.3, the neutron 939.6. The combination of two up quarks and a down quark gives us only 9.4, or just 1 percent of the mass of the proton. The combination of two down quarks and an up quark gives us only 11.9, or just 1.3 percent of the mass of the neutron. About 99 percent of the masses of the proton and neutron seem to be unaccounted for. What’s gone wrong?

To answer this question, we need to recognize what we’re dealing with. Quarks are not self-contained “particles” of the kind that the Greeks or the mechanical philosophers might have imagined. They are quantum wave-particles; fundamental vibrations or fluctuations of elementary quantum fields. The up and down quarks are only a few times heavier than the electron, and we’ve demonstrated the electron’s wave-particle nature in countless laboratory experiments. We need to prepare ourselves for some odd, if not downright bizarre behavior.

And let’s not forget the massless gluons. Or special relativity, and E = mc2. Or the difference between “bare” and “dressed” mass. And, last but not least, let’s not forget the role of the Higgs field in the “origin” of the mass of all elementary particles. To try to understand what’s going on inside a proton or neutron we need to reach for quantum chromodynamics, the quantum field theory of the color force between quarks.

Baggott_BR-5icedmocha / Shutterstock

Quarks and gluons possess color “charge.” Just what is this, exactly? We have no way of really knowing. We do know that color is a property of quarks and gluons and there are three types, which physicists have chosen to call red, green, and blue. But, just as nobody has ever “seen” an isolated quark or gluon, so more or less by definition nobody has ever seen a naked color charge. In fact, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) suggests that if a color charge could be exposed like this it would have a near-infinite energy. Aristotle’s maxim was that “nature abhors a vacuum.” Today we might say: “nature abhors a naked color charge.”

So, what would happen if we could somehow create an isolated quark with a naked color charge? Its energy would go up through the roof, more than enough to conjure virtual gluons out of “empty” space. Just as the electron moving through its own self-generated electromagnetic field gathers a covering of virtual photons, so the exposed quark gathers a covering of virtual gluons. Unlike photons, the gluons themselves carry color charge and they are able to reduce the energy by, in part, masking the exposed color charge. Think of it this way: The naked quark is acutely embarrassed, and it quickly dresses itself with a covering of gluons.

This isn’t enough, however. The energy is high enough to produce not only virtual particles (like a kind of background noise or hiss), but elementary particles, too. In the scramble to cover the exposed color charge, an anti-quark is produced which pairs with the naked quark to form a meson. A quark is never—but never—seen without a chaperone.

But this still doesn’t do it. To cover the color charge completely we would need to put the anti-quark in precisely the same place at precisely the same time as the quark. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle won’t let nature pin down the quark and anti-quark in this way. Remember that a precise position implies an infinite momentum, and a precise rate of change of energy with time implies an infinite energy. Nature has no choice but to settle for a compromise. It can’t cover the color charge completely but it can mask it with the anti-quark and the virtual gluons. The energy is at least reduced to a manageable level.

As we worked our way ever inward we lost sight of matter completely. Matter lost its tangibility.

This kind of thing also goes on inside the proton and neutron. Within the confines of their host particles, the three quarks rattle around relatively freely. But, once again, their color charges must be covered, or at least the energy of the exposed charges must be reduced. Each quark produces a blizzard of virtual gluons that pass back and forth between them, together with quark–anti-quark pairs. Physicists sometimes call the three quarks that make up a proton or a neutron “valence” quarks, as there’s enough energy inside these particles for a further sea of quark–anti-quark pairs to form. The valence quarks are not the only quarks inside these particles.

What this means is that the mass of the proton and neutron can be traced largely to the energy of the gluons and the sea of quark–anti-quark pairs that are conjured from the color field.

How do we know? Well, it must be admitted that it is actually really rather difficult to perform calculations using QCD. The color force is extremely strong, and the corresponding energies of color-force interactions are therefore very high. Remember that the gluons also carry color charge, so everything interacts with everything else. Virtually anything can happen, and keeping track of all the possible virtual and elementary-particle permutations is very demanding.

This means that although the equations of QCD can be written down in a relatively straightforward manner, they cannot be solved analytically, on paper. Also, the mathematical sleight-of-hand used so successfully in QED no longer applies—because the energies of the interactions are so high we can’t apply the techniques of renormalization. Physicists have had no choice but to solve the equations on a computer instead.

Considerable progress was made with a version of QCD called “QCD-lite.” This version considered only massless gluons and up and down quarks, and further assumed that the quarks themselves are also massless (so, literally, “lite”). Calculations based on these approximations yielded a proton mass that was found to be just 10 percent lighter than the measured value.

Let’s stop to think about that for a bit. A simplified version of QCD in which we assume that no particles have mass to start with nevertheless predicts a mass for the proton that is 90 percent right. The conclusion is quite startling. Most of the mass of the proton comes from the energy of the interactions of its constituent quarks and gluons.

John Wheeler used the phrase “mass without mass” to describe the effects of superpositions of gravitational waves which could concentrate and localize energy such that a black hole is created. If this were to happen, it would mean that a black hole—the ultimate manifestation of super-high-density matter—had been created not from the matter in a collapsing star but from fluctuations in spacetime. What Wheeler really meant was that this would be a case of creating a black hole (mass) from gravitational energy.

But Wheeler’s phrase is more than appropriate here. Frank Wilczek, one of the architects of QCD, used it in connection with his discussion of the results of the QCD-lite calculations. If much of the mass of a proton and neutron comes from the energy of interactions taking place inside these particles, then this is indeed “mass without mass,” meaning that we get the behavior we tend to ascribe to mass without the need for mass as a property.

Does this sound familiar? Recall that in Einstein’s seminal addendum to his 1905 paper on special relativity the equation he derived is actually m = E/c2. This is the great insight (not E = mc2). And Einstein was surely prescient when he wrote: “the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.”1 Indeed, it is. In his book The Lightness of Being, Wilczek wrote:2

If the body is a human body, whose mass overwhelmingly arises from the protons and neutrons it contains, the answer is now clear and decisive. The inertia of that body, with 95 percent accuracy, is its energy content.

In the fission of a U-235 nucleus, some of the energy of the color fields inside its protons and neutrons is released, with potentially explosive consequences. In the proton–proton chain involving the fusion of four protons, the conversion of two up quarks into two down quarks, forming two neutrons in the process, results in the release of a little excess energy from its color fields. Mass does not convert to energy. Energy is instead passed from one kind of quantum field to another.

Where does this leave us? We’ve certainly come a long way since the ancient Greek atomists speculated about the nature of material substance, 2,500 years ago. But for much of this time we’ve held to the conviction that matter is a fundamental part of our physical universe. We’ve been convinced that it is matter that has energy. And, although matter may be reducible to microscopic constituents, for a long time we believed that these would still be recognizable as matter—they would still possess the primary quality of mass.

Modern physics teaches us something rather different, and deeply counter-intuitive. As we worked our way ever inward—matter into atoms, atoms into sub-atomic particles, sub-atomic particles into quantum fields and forces—we lost sight of matter completely. Matter lost its tangibility. It lost its primacy as mass became a secondary quality, the result of interactions between intangible quantum fields. What we recognize as mass is a behavior of these quantum fields; it is not a property that belongs or is necessarily intrinsic to them.

Despite the fact that our physical world is filled with hard and heavy things, it is instead the energy of quantum fields that reigns supreme. Mass becomes simply a physical manifestation of that energy, rather than the other way around.

This is conceptually quite shocking, but at the same time extraordinarily appealing. The great unifying feature of the universe is the energy of quantum fields, not hard, impenetrable atoms. Perhaps this is not quite the dream that philosophers might have held fast to, but a dream nevertheless.

Jim Baggott is a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to work with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation, Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’, A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments, and A Beginner’s Guide to Reality.

Sounds like all the energy is electric (quantum). But they keep ignoring electricity to come up with more weird things to support the 'old ways' and of course, you can not even doubt GR/SR and BB/BH. How ironic.

interstellar filaments conducted electricity having currents as high as 10 thousand billion amperes